


Can You Imagine?

by astrosaur



Series: I wonder what happened in all those other timelines [2]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Epilogue Fic, M/M, background canon couples (which includes Reddie ofc), mentions past canon infidelity, tw for Mike's... eccentric food preferences
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:48:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25494145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrosaur/pseuds/astrosaur
Summary: Bill wraps his head around the concept of forgiveness, and Mike wraps his around moving on.
Relationships: Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon
Series: I wonder what happened in all those other timelines [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1846828
Kudos: 19





	Can You Imagine?

**Author's Note:**

> Follows the last timeline in [the few things that we know to be predictable](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25287037), but can be a standalone.
> 
> cat auntie did-not-actually-request a hanbrough ending, and who am I to deny a not-quite-request? This one is for you / is fully your fault ❤️

Bill’s place is the penultimate stop in Mike’s epic cross-country caper. His home is a spectacular parade of space, with high ceilings and minimal furnishings. It’s beautiful despite the immediate sense you get that half of it has recently been hollowed out.

After complimenting the pristine upkeep, the second thing Mike says is that he’s sorry to hear about Audra.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Bill says in response. He glances up from the glass on his kitchen counter, pausing mid-pour. “Not because… I’m just happy to see you again, in person.”

Mike takes the glass of water from him with a thankful smile. “I missed you, too.”

“Listen to us. Like we don’t talk every day.” Bill isn’t even exaggerating. Since their departure from Derry, they’ve gotten on the phone to take daily inventory of what they’ve remembered. It’s for peace-of-mind as much as it is an ongoing bid to be reinstated in each other’s lives.

Mike finishes the last drop of water before pouring himself another glass. “If you want something sweet, I’ve got candies from Ben and Bev. It’s pretty good. They make their own honey.”

“That better not be a euphemism for something.”

Mike chortles. “No, Ben literally has a honeybee hive. They’re raising bees together and Ben’s been teaching Bev to bake. They’re really sweet together. Truly disgusting.”

“And you survived an entire week with them. You never cease to impress.”

“I’m just glad Richie was only around for a couple of days when I went to visit Eddie,” Mike says. “Speaking of, Eddie had me bring something for you, too. Rich chipped in, I think. It’s this fancy Polish liqueur that he’s into. Unironically. Not to spoil the surprise, but there’s actual gold flakes in it.”

“Oh dear god,” mutters Bill.

“Stan had the exact same reaction. But it’s not the worst thing I’ve tasted?” Mike’s ringing endorsement draws a snicker from Bill.

“So you bring provisions from the Marsh-Hanscoms and the Kaspbrak-Toziers. Anything from the Uris-Blums?”

“Warmest regards?” Mike quips. “Actually, can we circle back to ‘Kaspbrak-Tozier’? People should not be allowed to double-barrel surnames with that many syllables.”

“Can’t say I’m familiar with this law, but go on, I could stand to be educated on the topic.”

“Bottom line, if Richie and Eddie were to ever join in unholy matrimony, you know you’re going to double-duty as best man for both of them. So it’ll be on you to advise them against hyphenating.”

“Don’t even joke about that. There are only two people who are truly capable of reining Richie in, so that spot is reserved for Beverly or his sister.”

“Well, I’m claiming the best man post for Ben, so you can forget about muscling in on that one.”

Bill tries not to recoil at the thought of being Ben’s best man. By his estimation, there’s only one or two people in the world who’d deserve it less than Bill does. “You think he’s going to propose?”

“ _She’s_ going to. That’s what they decided. Because if she asks, then they’ll be sure that they’re both ready for it.”

Bill can almost see them, radiant and otherworldly, submerged in the affections they’ve long been kept from.

“I swear I can talk about things other than our friends’ weddings,” Mike says, voice dimming with a tint of an apology.

Bill waves him off. “Oh, I was just picturing it. Bev and Ben’s wedding.”

“How’d it look like?”

“Joyful. Heartfelt. To borrow a phrase, truly disgusting.”

“You know, I’ve made my way through twenty different states in the last month or so, and the most shocking vision I’ve yet to come upon is right here in California.”

Bill already knows he’s being set up for something, but he asks anyway, “And what would that be?”

“The sight of William Denbrough, best-selling author of _The Black Rapids_ and _Attic Room_ , finally able to picture a happy ending.”

.

It can be argued that Bill is a professional finder of potential.

An author’s imagination must transcend the bounds of _what_ - _is_ , navigating parallel worlds of _what-could-be_.

That being said, he can’t manage to wrap his head around the prospect of earning Audra’s forgiveness. When she foisted it on him, not two months into divorce proceedings, it took him aback, to the extent that he tried to rebuff the goodwill she offered.

She rejected his rejection with trademark flair. “I’m not putting in any more emotional investment so you can get off on your guilt BDSM,” she’d said. “As your soon to be ex-wife, I beg you, find something else to masturbate to.”

She wasn’t nasty about it. Not nearly as vindictive as the circumstances called for. Her last partner had cheated on her habitually, and Bill was privy to the related insecurities she harbored.

She also isn’t wrong in deducing that, deep down, he was less interested in mercy than he was in cooperative flagellation. And while she’s entitled to retribution, she’s certainly not obliged to render it herself. She had healthier, more fruitful areas in her life to divert her energy to.

Mike hardly ever hears more than a neat blurb of the events, in large part because Bill can’t incriminate Beverly. And Mike doesn’t push him on it, as if he’s got some sort of sixth sense on when Bill requires a stern talking-to and when he’d genuinely be better off given a wide berth.

Beverly refuses to talk about it, full stop. She’d listen patiently whenever Bill lamented about doing too little to deserve Audra’s clemency, or Mike’s time, but she won’t let him get specific about the root of his remorse. She, of course, isn’t the type of person to disown her mistakes. She exalts mental health professionals often enough that Bill can ascertain who she turns to when she needs to confront her demons.

For his part, Bill’s gotten better at breaking out of these cycles of self-inflicted torture. He’s better equipped to accept arbitrary tragedies as things beyond his control. But in this case, he’s got the ruins of his marriage underneath the soles of his feet. His sordid intentions sit squarely on his conscience.

The first step he took in the right direction was to follow Beverly’s footsteps. It took an outside perspective to help him understand that he’d been asking for others to pick his wounds, rather than working on mending them himself.

There’s only one person who can help him feel as though he deserves forgiveness. Only one person should take that on.

.

Mike makes them breakfast, in the loosest definition of the word. Bill’s insomnia prevents them from partaking at a conventional time, as he drags himself out of bed past noon.

Conversely, Mike got up at the crack of dawn, despite being the one who’d spent the last month rollicking from state to state in his weather-beaten Honda Accord. Bill suspects that Mike’s sleep schedule hasn’t deviated much from middle school, when he would race to the farm before the sun could beat him to it.

Evidently, Mike woke up early enough to make a grocery run and whip up a borderline intimidating amount of food. His spread includes a mix of fruits, a sweet potato hash, and tacos that teem with eggs, avocados, tomatillos, broccoli, and—Mike all but squeals this part—shiitake bacon.

“They make bacon out of mushrooms, Bill. _Mushrooms_.”

Bill remembers the profane culinary abominations that thrilled Mike as a kid, so there’s no part of his unbridled enthusiasm that throws him off.

Maybe it was because breakfasts in general have become a bit of an anomaly to Bill, but the first bite he takes is akin to setting off fireworks of flavor in his mouth. He reins in his hyperboles, if only so that Mike doesn’t mistake it for sarcasm. “This is really good. No wonder Eddie’s already trying to lure you back to New York.”

“He wants to have me around so I can arbitrate his and Richie’s pointless debates.” Mike takes a hearty chomp of the hash and he frowns at his food in consternation. He reaches for a bottle of red Gringo Bandito sauce that Bill had not owned prior to today, and he pumps generous dollops of it onto his plate.

“Might want to taste that before you—”

Mike coughs, hand coming up to his chest. “It’s good.”

“You okay?” Bill’s already on his feet, sweeping his own hand over the considerable expanse of Mike’s back.

“Yeah, it went down the wrong tube. Tasty, though.” Mike arches an eyebrow at Bill’s insistent presence. “I promise, you won’t need to do the Heimlich maneuver on me.”

And that comment all but gives Bill the license to imagine budging up behind Mike, winding his arms around that sturdy torso, and crushing him against his chest.

Bill hurries back to his seat.

What’s happening with Mike is not entirely new, in that Bill has gone in too deep for one person before. What’s new is how long it’s taken him to get to that point.

And it’s nothing at all like the most immediate examples of love around them. With Mike, there was no glimpse of red hair that captivated him so wholly that it bubbled out of him in iambic pentameters. There was no instantaneous pull that defined their linked destinies as a constant.

With Mike, it’s more of a build-up. The admiration and tenderness accumulated, gradual and laboring. With Mike, it’s a collective of infinitesimal nudges, of barely visible ripples that crawl in succession until they emerge as a tidal wave, several lifetimes later.

Eventually, Mike wrenches Bill from his internal rhapsodizing. “I know you just woke up, but do you already need a nap? Are we at that age?”

“Sorry. I get a bit fuzzy when I take liquid melatonin.”

Mike makes a sympathetic noise. “I tried the one Patty uses and I woke up fine. I forgot what brand it was. It was cherry-flavored.”

Bill groans. “That’s the worst.”

“Oh, hundred percent. When will those scientists learn that their synthetic cherry-adjacent flavor doesn’t add to the taste, it detracts from it.”

“To be fair, if you wrote them recently with a request to change the flavor to onion and peanut butter, I’d ignore you, too, you absolute heathen.”

“Hey, Richie was the only one of you adventurous enough to try my sandwiches, and he ended up liking them just fine.” Mike and Bill share a look before they burst out into laughter. “Yeah, I’m not sure why I said that like I wasn’t making your point for you.”

Bill glances at the wall clock. “It’s two PM. Plans for the day? What do you want to do?”

Mike puts his fork down, taking time with that question.

.

Mike is a bit of a specialist in conjectures.

A historian’s imagination must transcend the bounds of _what_ - _is_ , in order to resolve it with _what_ - _was_. He routinely navigates former worlds of _what-could-have-been_.

Which is all well and good, until he has to take this experience and apply it so that he can determine _what-comes-next_.

His future, like most others’, is an amorphous notion. A blank slate as unknowable and intimidating as the cosmos. Barren without an unequivocal purpose—a life-or-death objective—hanging over it.

He’s been biding his time with this coast-to-coast road trip, flitting from one fleeting moment to the next. He thinks he might be able to subsist on it, and some days, he supposes he may as well.

Especially for moments like this one, where Bill’s toting him around Grand Central Market for a bite of whatever catches their eye. Where Bill does things like always placing a fork in Mike’s left hand because that’s his dominant one, or paying for both of them because Mike made the mistake of mentioning how much money he’d lost in Atlantic City. (Not even in Las Vegas—in _New Jersey_ , of all places.)

That got Bill telling him, “I’m paying for you and I’m never letting you pay me back. Remember this the next time you want to go to a casino without supervision.” Honestly, Stan’s pointed disappointment was a strong enough deterrent on its own, not to mention the time he caught Ben sneaking cash into his clean laundry. (“It’s reparations!” Ben would later insist.)

It’s the slightest bit mortifying to think about his financially well-off friends funneling their philanthropic dole-outs to him, so he tries not to dwell on it.

Mike finishes off his Bill-sponsored mango sticky rice in record time. It’s the seventh favorite food he’d discovered in a row, displacing buko pie from the top spot and ending the latter’s fifteen-minute-long reign. He checks his phone, which has been buzzing for the last few minutes, and finds an app notification to be the culprit.

“Who’s that?” Bill wonders.

Mike doesn’t answer right away, getting caught up reading the news alert.

“Someone you met in your travels?” Bill prods.

“No, sorry.” Mike locks his phone and pockets it. “Did you hear about that rally? White supremacists marching with tiki torches?”

“I did, kind of. Peripherally. Where was that, Charlottesville?”

“Yeah. Well, now they’re gearing up to do another rally in defense of—wait for it—a fucking Confederate statue. God forbid we stop honoring a man who owned slaves, beat them regularly, and fought to keep them enslaved.”

Bill seethes correspondingly. “None of those Klansmen could even imagine being at the other end of oppression.”

“Reading about it honestly makes me want to drive down to Virginia and find the counter-protestors.”

“I’ll come with,” Bill says without hestitation nor a trace of irony. “You’ve been keeping up with this?”

“Yeah, well. Stepping down as Derry’s minder cleared my itinerary. Turns out there’s more than enough to fill my time with what’s going around in the rest of the country, let alone the rest of the world.”

Bill clears his throat. “Do you think you could use a breather from your causes?”

“My ‘causes’,” Mike repeats blandly.

“No, sorry, I didn’t mean it that way,” Bill says. “I’m obviously not going to stop you from pursuing what matters to you—”

“‘Obviously’?”

“—but I—yes, _obviously_. You’re brilliant and you’re a fundamentally good person, which is a combination that the world is in woefully short supply of. The more of you that the world can have, the better off it’ll be.”

Entirely unprepared for Bill’s candid praise, Mike dithers. “I- but. I mean, we’re all.”

“You don’t have to react to that,” Bill advises. “All I wanted to say is, you have my utmost support in whatever you want to do. But remember, you’re allowed to rest every now and then. Reset.”

Mike gestures vaguely around them with a broad sweep of his arm. “And what would you call this trip?”

“Okay, that’s fair,” Bill relents. “Fine, you’re right. So… keep it up?”

“Roger that, captain.”

“Alright, I deserve that.”

Mike bumps their shoulders. “I see what you’re getting at, though. Thanks, Bill.”

.

When Mike was handing in his two-week notice, he thought, _I could work at another library. That’s a possibility._

While he and Eddie were ambling around the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn: _What if I worked in a museum?_

After he accompanied Stan and Patty to their weekly visit to an animal shelter: _Maybe I should get more involved in animal rights._

Talking to Bill with no screens between them, their messages no longer relying on radio waves: _What if I could have more of this?_

Leaving California will be an ordeal in its own league.

Mike sank into the waves of regret at the tail-end of his stays with Richie and Eddie, Ben and Beverly, Patty and Stan. But he already knows it’s going to sting even worse when he has to part with Bill.

They hadn’t been especially tight when they were kids, no more than the others were. Back then, Bill had been an aspiration as much as he’d been a friend. It’s only recently that Mike fully divested himself of that mindset. Not to say that Bill is any less capable of galvanizing Mike’s spirits. He remains an inspiration, but that is now mitigated by the moments wherein he looks to Mike to return the favor.

That makes all the difference. It opens their relationship up to make room for mutual respect, and a deeper understanding of each other’s anchors. It ushers in an unspoken camaraderie from having made a moral decision to put themselves and their friends in harm’s way.

But it’s strictly physical proximity that Mike will be losing, because Bill’s continued presence is guaranteed elsewhere. It just won’t be the same when it takes the form of text messages, or when it’s contained in palm-sized rectangles.

Mike can’t cling to the past. Bill tells him as much, and tells him often—you can let Derry fend for itself now, it’s not on you to worry about that town anymore, your whole identity isn’t just about saving others. And so forth.

And he understands that. Both of them have new chapters write.

.

“I can’t believe you read the last seven chapters overnight,” Bill says. He cuts into the pancakes he made, which—despite being flatter than his ass—he feels are a solid effort.

“A librarian that reads quickly—now that’s a plot twist,” Mike snarks. “I couldn’t sleep. Plus I’ve never read a draft before, not one with the author’s notes and everything. That was cool, like I was getting a behind-the-scenes glimpse. A private tour into the inner-workings of a Hugo-Award-winning brain.”

“You really think that if you lay on the flattery thick enough, I won’t notice you refusing to comment on the work itself.”

“Excuse me, I fawned over it for an hour straight the other day. How much more validation do you need, exactly?”

“No, I don’t want—I mean, I just want to know what you thought of the last chapters.”

“They were fantastic.” Mike’s response is prompt and authoritative, using a tone that’s normally reserved for indisputable facts. “I have not read a face-heel turn as compelling since _The Traitor Baru Cormorant_.”

“A what and the who?”

Mike sighs. “Add that one, too.”

“You know, some of us haven’t spent half our lives within arm’s reach of free books,” Bill reminds him even as he unlocks his phone to add yet another one of Mike’s recommendations to his reading list.

“Don’t start with me, Mr. ‘E-readers-are-better-for-the-environment’. Do not,” Mike warns. “But anyway, that entire chain of events was just. Winsome, sticking to her guns while the others made their case about greater evils? And Thanh— _Thanh_ , managing to respect her even when disagreeing with her so completely? So good.”

“What about Liam?” Bill asks through a mouthful of buttery starch.

Mike stops eating altogether, intent on giving his opinions. “Liam’s arc. Liam’s. _Arc_. When he used Phillip’s weakness against him—I’m not even kidding, I was having palpitations in that part. And like, Liam was absolutely in the wrong, no question, but… I don’t know, you still root for him in the end. You just know he wants to do better later on.”

“Do you think he got off too easily?”

“I mean, he lost Phillip. Unless Phillip ever decides to forgive him. And he regrets what he did, and he has to live with that.”

“Yeah, and… that’s it.”

“…Is this you asking for permission to kill him off, too? Look, we’ve already talked about your affinity for the redemption-in-death trope.”

“I didn’t say he has to die, but. There should be _something_.”

“Well, what’s redemption supposed to look like? Liam was there for Winsome, right? He stuck around to help her keep the gate shut,” reasons Mike.

Bill remembers his therapist asking what it did for other people when he chooses to punish himself with guilt. How did that benefit Audra, or those who choose to remain in his life?

“He had a dire lapse in judgment one time,” Mike continues. “But no one is the worst mistake they ever made. Not if they learn from it.”

Bill remembers Audra volunteering kinder words than she had to. She told him there was more to their relationship than its fateful undoing, and for those earlier days, she didn’t have it in her to hate him.

“We can talk about something else,” Mike offers. He concentrates on dissecting his stack of pancakes, carving into it with a sculptor’s fixation.

“I hurt her.” Bill’s voice struggles with the density of his contrition, syllables minced by the sharpness of his shame. “She suffered because of—I _cheated_ on her. Whatever I was going through, I hurt her, and I have to live with what I did.”

Wordlessly, Mike rounds the dining table to get an arm around Bill. He lowers himself to a squat, holding onto Bill’s shoulder with one hand and petting his side with the other. He draws him close until their heads touch, leaning against one another.

“I’ll do better,” Bill says, precious little else to offer in the moment.

“I know you will,” Mike murmurs. “You’re a good person.”

“I’ll try to be.”

“Yeah,” Mike says, and it sounds like _that’s what I mean_.

.

A nighttime stroll around Bill’s neighborhood takes them to a mostly empty park. They head to the dimly lit playground section, where Bill clambers onto one of the swings. He pushes off the ground lightly, making constrained arcs in the air. Mike takes the swing next to him, but not before slipping behind him and giving him an exuberant shove.

The air rings with the ebb and flow of Mike’s laughter and Bill’s squawking bursts of panic.

Bill’s still holding onto the chains with dual vice grips as the swing slows to a stop.

“That was incredible,” Mike comments. “That pitch you just hit? Not once did I hear you come close to it in the multiple times we were literally running for our lives.”

“See if I let you even come close to a playground in Virginia.”

One corner of Mike’s mouth lifts. “You really want to do it?”

Bill shrugs one shoulder. “No worse than meeting up anywhere else. No, wait. Are you still thinking about moving to Florida?”

“Haven’t really found a reason to change my mind,” Mike says, digging the toe of his shoes into the sand. “Yeah, I’m leaning towards the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area.”

“It’s just such an unexpected choice for you. You can’t tell me you’re a beach guy. You don’t want to see Santa Monica, you were always the first to get out of the water in the quarry—before Stan, even.”

“There’s more to Miami than beaches,” Mike reminds him mildly.

Bill’s eyebrow rises to the zone in his forehead reserved for extreme skepticism. “If you’re talking about the weather, you haven’t been there during the summer. It isn’t like California. At least, here, you don’t feel like you’re being dragged through coals.”

“Summers might be rough,” Mike concedes. “But I think it’s a fair trade for living in one of the rare hubs of culture in this country. Think about it—Caribbean, Jamaican, Dominican communities? And I’m not so naive as to think that the one experience I’ve had there will be universally applicable, but.” He shrugs. “It was reason for optimism.”

“That’s great,” Bill says sincerely. Then, “Not to belabor the point, but LA’s plenty diverse.”

“Am I crazy, or aren’t you the one who nixes Bev and Eddie whenever they try to one-up each other in selling Nebraska and New York to me?”

“Guess I’m a hypocrite _and_ an adulterer.”

“Don’t call yourself that,” Mike requests.

Bill obliges him, visibly biting back his arguments.

“You know, a part of me dreaded it,” Mike admits. “The seven of us scattering to the four winds again.”

“Even if you’re participating in the ‘scattering’ this time?”

“Even if,” confirms Mike. “But talking to you every day—it helps. Stops me from freaking out about whether we still haven’t succeeded. Or whether we succeeded, but we’d still end up forgetting what we went through at some point. I’ve pretty much accepted that my brain’ll just keep catastrophizing ‘til it stops working altogether.”

“I’ll pick up whenever you call. Whenever,” Bill stresses. “You know that, right?”

“I appreciate that.” Mike kicks at the ground, putting all his energy behind it and really going for the largest allowable trajectory. The whole structure shakes with gusto, not quite built for people like him. “I like having a friend I can rely on not to answer their phone in a state of undress.”

“Richie should be banned from video calls.” Bill takes a few steps backwards, rear still planted on the swing. He lifts his legs and lets the swing ferry him forward, giving in to its momentum. “Know what? Throw Eddie and Stan in, too. No one needs physical evidence of their friends’ sexual appetites.”

Mike lets out a delighted, disgusted cackle. “Polite society would dictate that you ignore those observations. Like, maybe don’t use them to extrapolate what our friends do in their own time.”

“There’s hardly any extrapolation going on. Hickeys the size of golf balls don’t leave much room for interpretation, Mikey.”

Bill and Mike move out of sync, propelling in different directions at first, one lagging the other.

It reminds Mike of how, when they were kids, Bill would lead (reluctantly), and Mike and the others would follow. Then, not so long ago, Mike would lead them back to Derry, and Bill would follow.

A couple of turns later, Mike and Bill’s upswings synchronize, side-by-side with each swooping dip and each rebounding ascent.

Mike’s heading back east tomorrow. He tries not to imagine what it’d be like to chase after each other one more time.

.

On Mike’s last day camping out at Bill’s, breakfast preparation is a joint undertaking. It is an elaborate, all-hands-on-deck, three-course operation. The main course is a recipe Mike adopted from Ben, with the kind of structural complexity you’d expect from him.

While waiting for Bill to wake up, Mike had enough time to draw up a menu. It’s a sheet of paper folded thrice, wielding coarse doodles, dubious dish names (“Enjoy the Fruits of Your Labor”, “Garfield Uses the Eggplant Emoji”, and “Thanks For Pudding Me Up”), and descriptions befitting a food blog.

Bill’s chest feels too flimsy for everything it’s trying to carry.

He’s too stupefied by his affection to even question the plan of baking a lasagna first thing in the morning, let alone eating such a heavy dish before his stomach even realizes it’s awake. But that’s where they’re at, waiting on a veggie-fied pasta dish to finish cooking.

As the oven timer winds down, Mike offers up his camera roll for Bill’s viewing pleasure. He eagerly peppers in commentary on every subtle angle change, every indistinguishable shift in his subject’s facial expressions.

“You’re really something.”

Mike pauses, understandably bewildered by Bill’s interjection. “Thank you? I’m sorry?” he tries, in case either is appropriate.

“Here’s… I’m.” Bill didn’t have a follow-up to that. He wasn’t even sure if he’d meant to say it aloud. “I want to be near you. All the time.”

Mike’s eyes widen. A scowl begins to line his face.

Not the reaction Bill was going for. “I’m not saying this because I want something from you,” he explains. “Not right in this moment, that is, not with. With.” _Not with everything else going on_. “The thing is. Have you ever been with another man?”

“What? Why? Have you?” Mike throws back. It’s defensive, but not in the way Bill would’ve suspected. He almost sounds abashed by his inexperience.

“Once in college,” Bill divulges.

“…Really?”

Bill nods. “I’ve only ever told Audra about it. It wasn’t—I don’t know. I came out of it pretty much convinced that I was… straight?” The lilt at the end mars the declarative intent of his statement.

Mike’s “oh” comes out like it’s been punched out of him.

“Except,” Bill continues. “When I think of you, it feels like…” Like it can’t be anything but being in love. “Like all bets are off. That is not a reference to your Atlantic City mishap,” Bill clarifies before Mike can ask. “Does that make sense?”

Mike stares. “No.”

“No,” Bill agrees easily enough. “But that’s how it is.”

Mike covers his mouth with the back of his wrist. An odd habit of his that Bill noticed recently, how he brings his hand up to his mouth whenever he mulled over something. Absently, he mumbles, “So we both might be too unwilling to live apart from each other.”

“Yeah?” Grinning from ear to ear, Bill holds Mike’s face, breath stuttering when he doesn’t pull away. They sit like this for a few awful and thrilling minutes. A barrage of words between them, but none said out loud.

“You’re still married,” Mike finally says.

“I am.”

“And straight.”

“I love you.” Bill lets his words hang in the air for a moment on their own. He waits until it’s bearing down too heavily on them, then he waits some more. Finally, “I mean it in all the ways I’ve meant it before, but also. Also.” His hands migrate back up to Mike’s neck, fingers mapping the shape they find. “This.”

Mike brings his hands up to rest on Bill’s forearms. He turns his head to the side, lips ghosting over the skin at Bill’s wrist. “I’m not saying we have to wait for your divorce to go through.” His cadence is measured, soft like a breath taken before a bellow. “But I think it’s too soon.”

“Okay,” Bill finds himself agreeing.

“Is it? That’s okay?” Mike’s smile belongs to a man who’s fully aware of their dissimilar approaches when it comes to acting on their instincts.

“Of course it is,” Bill assures him wholeheartedly. “I don’t want you to have doubts about me. I want to prove that you can trust me.”

“You trusted me.” Mike continues to be deliberate with his words. “When I called the six of you, you trusted me to tell you what was real, despite how unreal it all seemed at that time. You trusted me to decide whether the risk we’d take would be worth it or not.”

“Yeah.”

“Has that changed?”

Bill’s thumbs sweep over Mike’s cheekbones, wracked with tiny tremors of reverence. “Would you want company driving back to Maine?”

“You want to come with me?” Mike asks, oddly awestruck.

“I’ve got a laptop. I can work anywhere. You and I can take turns driving.”

“And after that?”

“We figure it out. Between you and me, we’ll come up with something.”

Bill practically watches Mike get stranded in his own head.

“You can tell me if you want, like. Alone time,” Bill says. “I’m happy to give it you from a distance or from a hotel room next door. Whatever works.”

“I actually might’ve had my fill of alone time.” Mike snorts suddenly, a chuckle shaking loose from him before Bill can completely digest what he’d just said. “I’m not laughing at you. But do you realize—we’re in our _forties_. What forty-year-olds—”

“—go up against a supernatural, shapeshifting, murderous monster?”

“Point taken.” Mike mirrors Bill’s stance, cradling his face. “Might want to start packing, then.”

“In a bit.” One of Bill’s arms migrates down to loop around Mike’s waist, finding a wonderfully precocious space that’s too high for a lover’s arm to rest, too low for just any friend to venture to. “I’m good like this.” He purposefully doesn’t qualify it with “for now”. He doesn’t have to.

.

Imagine what would happen if you put an author and a historian together. The narratives they come up with, the plots they could unravel.

The only thing is, the author has been crucified for his subpar endings before. But maybe with the right collaborator, the two of them can figure out how to get to a happy one.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading and have a good (bike) night!


End file.
